Poetry. FRUITLANDS is the probing, intelligent debut collection of poems from this Bay Area poet. "Taking its title from the transcendentalist utopian community founded by Bronson Alcott, FRUITLANDS offers its own visionary perspective on contemporary life. In this collection, cultural work is social innovation, and Kate Colby produces and decomposes identity, history, and narrative through fully engaged aesthetic practice....Colby maps out exciting possibilities for poetry and other spaces of representation in this stunning debut"--Paul Foster Johnson. "Under pressure, under duress, being a creature of habit caught in the sudden glare of utopic wishfulness, one wakes up in Fruitlands, smuggled inside Colby's intriguing and recombinant language of surveillance, pulled into suggested routes of survival and eco-linguistic liberties in a century you suddenly desire"--Kathleen Fraser.

Fruitlands

Literature & Fiction

Colby, Kate

Poetry

Litmus Press

Poetry. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE is both a pastoral and its counterpoint. A series of 23 poems, it enacts a struggle between the romance of recorded history and the social conditions of the global present. Topical threads include New England colonial, American folk, and Native American history; the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts; and the specious gloss of American "road" culture, all filtered through a fine mesh of Thomas Hardy.

The Return of the Native

Ugly Duckling Presse

Poetry. "Kate Colby's BEAUPORT opens windows framing history framing natural and unnatural settings (traffic, waves, skylines, sky). The work presents a series of displacements, smoke and mirror memory experiments, stitching together with anachronism the physical and the metaphysical. This is a fascinating book, composing and collapsing (wing, telescope), foregrounding subject, object and sightlines in between. With its architecture of vignettes, lullabies, hymns and fragments, Colby's BEAUPORT constructs resistances, ever confronting its considered grace and precision in ripples of savory humors"—Norma Cole.

Beauport

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. Essay. Part autofiction, part sequential critical engagement, the eponymous essay in DREAM OF THE TRENCHES investigates and builds upon narrative recursion, self-reflexivity and subjective treatments of time in modern and contemporary writing. Winding through the work of Ben Lerner, it also addresses Ashbery, Woolf, Stein, Lessing, Mathews, Knausgaard and others. An accompanying sequence of 20 micro-essays--each of exactly 150 words--explores the possibilities of formal constraint with torqued language ranging across topics from beauty to popular music to the senescence of lobsters.

Dream of the Trenches

History & Criticism

Noemi Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Kate Colby's sixth book is a personal ars poetica that looks back on her previous work and asks what she meant to say, what she keeps meaning to, and how to mean more. In a long, cumulative poem and a collection of lyric essays she explores how meaning is made and denied in and by art and language, effecting an urgent movement toward meaning with hope for no hope for arrival.

I Mean

Poetry. Winner of 4th annual, Furniture Press Poetry Prize, selected by Elizabeth Robinson. "Kate Colby's poems unfurl like a complex melody. You wander through the day with them, following the loop of tune. 'Everything might already exist,' she writes, 'but it hasn't all been found.' Here, perceptions open and develop within harmonic patterns. These poems—both frank and delicate—form the medium of discovery. If the 'head is a holey bag,' those holes look out onto the universe as much as absorb it. Put another way, this poetry isn't just memorable, it embeds itself in the reader and germinates. Colby's robust intelligence and her vulnerability make for a poetry that has durable, if evolving, meaning. As the poet herself writes, creation 'exhausts its impetus, but traces tendril out.'"—Elizabeth Robinson

Blue Hole

Furniture Press Books

Reverse Engineer

Ornithopter Press

The short, spare poems of The Arrangements are concerned with physical and ideological boundaries of body, mind and language, exploring where they meet and the different ways in which they bleed into and maintain one another’s discreteness. Praise for Colby's book, I Mean: “With verve and purpose, Colby plays trick after alluring trick to write herself in and out of meaning.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Arrangements

Four Way Books

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